In November, celebrated dramaturg, choreographer, and trainer Melanie George is taking the reins at Marymount Manhattan School’s dance program as chair and producing director, bringing together with her three many years of knowledge from a profession inside larger schooling and all through the business.
“I’ve a lot enthusiasm for working with these college students and this school,” George says. Affiliate curator and scholar-in-residence at Jacob’s Pillow, she additionally directed the dance program at American College, labored as an assistant professor at Rutgers College, and visitor lectured at Harvard College, the Yale College of Drama, and The Juilliard College.
George’s Imaginative and prescient for Marymount’s Dance Program
George’s appointment comes throughout Marymount’s ongoing merger with Boston’s Northeastern College. Quickly, Marymount’s campus will change into Northeastern New York Metropolis, and Marymount college students will achieve entry to Northeastern’s world array of analysis and tutorial sources.
“Marymount is clearly in a singular time,” George says. However, she says, “this new period doesn’t imply ignoring the previous historical past. Marymount already has an extremely profitable program.”
The dance program at present contains BA (concentrations in dance research, dance and media, educating dance arts, and physique, science, and movement), BFA (concentrations in ballet, choreography, jazz, and fashionable), and minor tracks. College students have entry to seven studios, two efficiency areas on campus, world-class school, study-abroad alternatives, and internships.
George’s imaginative and prescient for the long run meshes this spectacular scaffolding with a real-time understanding of at the moment’s dance business. “A lot of dance larger ed curriculum has been conceived for a lot of many years is round the concept that you’re going to affix an organization,” George says. “The repertory firm in the best way that we have now recognized it up to now, is just one of many fashions we must always put together our college students for.”
Marymount, she says, has an opportunity to set a cutting-edge instance for the best way to replicate at the moment’s actuality, coaching college students “to be prepared, to arrange them to be entrepreneurs.”
Marymount’s Excellent College
George’s imaginative and prescient already aligns with Marymount’s school, lots of whom work alongside Marymount alumni in New York Metropolis and past, and preserve their ears to the bottom for what the subsequent era of artists might have.
“I’m actually making an attempt to get [students] to be extraordinarily interested by all of the issues they’re taken with, all there’s to do within the area of dance,” says assistant dance professor Jamal White. “That manner they don’t really feel like they must do one factor.”
White, for instance, attracts from a background in classical, fashionable, and up to date dance. He’s danced with BODYTRAFFIC, Lar Lubovitch Dance Firm, Rasta Thomas’ Rock the Ballet, Missouri Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey II, and Collage Dance Collective, together with collaborating in business dance work, choreographing, and educating throughout the nation.
“Due to the flexibility [of my background], I used to be capable of soar out and in of the totally different areas of the sector,” White says. Now, he desires the identical for his college students.
For George, that is very true in all of the real-world experiences Marymount may give its dancers. “It’s not simply what’s occurring within the classroom,” she says. “It’s actually all the things that’s happening round them on a regular basis.” Along with rehearsal and efficiency alternatives, these within the BA and BFA tracks work with skilled choreographers every semester. This fall, Limón Dance Firm artist Savannah Spratt is educating Suite from A Choreographic Providing, primarily based on Jose Limón’s 1964 tribute to Doris Humphrey. “They’re so younger and desirous to study,” Spratt says. “Realizing that they’re a part of our New York Metropolis dance neighborhood is so nice.”
Marymount’s Alternatives Create Employable Dancers
Whereas George desires to take care of these alternatives for publicity—and maybe even increase the quantity afforded to every scholar—she’s additionally taken with educating college students concerning the behind-the-scenes curatorial work of what makes a superb dance live performance.
“They need to be studying from the rep, not simply whereas within the rep,” she says. “There’s an arc to a robust live performance, and it has to do with present order and the tone of the work. The wants and have an effect on of a big ensemble piece are totally different from smaller ensemble works and each have their place in faculty repertory.”
Insights like these are what produce an employable dancer.
Marymount seeks ever-curious college students. “Should you’re interested by the whole area of dance, you probably have a wonderment about all that it has to supply—creation, live performance dance, jazz, vernacular jazz, West African, any diasporic type—when you’re taken with all these issues, Marymount has a spot for you,” White says. “We’re educating the subsequent era of dancers the best way to exit and have so many instruments of their our bodies.”
George can’t wait to information Marymount’s subsequent era of dancers. “It’s necessary that we step into what’s going to include hope, with optimism, and use ingenuity in the best way that we navigate it,” she says.
Study extra about Marymount Manhattan’s division of dance and the best way to apply right here.
